Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Something happened...

Familiarity with the earliest writings and oral legends, from every culture around the globe, as delineated by such scholars as Mircea Eliade, shows commonality: gods created mankind, some even created the Earth, and others created the Universe.

The stories are not disparate, but they are diffuse, so that one cannot attribute them to one unique source.

Early man, and early societies, scattered as they were and separated not only by distances and geography, experienced incursions by entities that anthropomorphism can’t account for.

[See, particularly, Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideas, Three Volumes, University of Chicago, 1978.]

The Hebrew Bible, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek myths, the Vedic writings, along with later accounts by native Americans, the ideographs of the Maya, and so on all attribute creation, in toto, to gods, or “supreme beings.”

All these writings and/or remembrances have a uniformity which indicates something specific happened during the primitive stages of humanity.

Joseph Campbell’s renderings of the world’s myths don’t make the accusation that the myths represented something real, in the mundane sense certainly.

Carl Jung, however, felt that myth was an overlay of truthful events.

To argue either way is futile, we think. The creation stories that have arisen from every corner of the world, during varying times, most before the common era and many harking back from later dates to a culture’s primeval past (The Incan and Inuit societies, among others).

The “fact” is that some intrusions occurred during the formative history of mankind. That is hardly arguable. The nature of those intrusions are diverse in kind but only as far as the minutiae involved; the episodes are pretty much alike in the renditions.

Unfortunately, there are no tangible proofs that allow us to zero in on who those gods were or what their motivations, if any, were.

But they arrived. They mucked around. And here we are, millennia later, no wiser about what this existence is all about and what our real role in this existence is.

So, we move on….to an existential milieu (where everything is nothing) or we settle down to exploration of the Universe, where the answer may lie, but don’t count on it.